The iPhone's great Reimagination?
Back in 2013 (I know...) I was presenting Geoffrey Moore's fundamental model of innovation cycles from his book Dealing With Darwin. The core idea was that, despite being dressed up in complex models, you can fundamentally describe product innovation as just three modes:
- Reimagining — introducing an entirely new way of doing things.
- Diversification — enhancing or expanding in seemingly infinite fractal ways this initial idea.
- Reduction — after a while, a powerful move that distills the whole complexity we arrived at into a simpler, unique, and seemingly final form that no one can move away from anymore.
This likens innovation to the Romanesco broccoli, a fractal vegetable that spirals out from the core in repeatedly complex ways.
And the story of the mobile phone is the perfect illustration of this wave of possibilities that end up stuck around an immovable form factor. At first, we have a radical shift with the first mass-marketed mobile phones (doing at the time something fundamentally different for the TelCos and their customers). Then we have successive mobile upgrades with iterative enhancements, and the era of Nokia and Motorola trying every possible way to make phones sexy and interesting. And eventually, in 2007, the great "reduction" with Apple's bold reduction, trimming away the noise to focus on what matters, a square glass slab that will stay more or less the same for +15 years.
Fast forward to today, and the signals about Apple needing to unstuck itself from the iPhone form factor are becoming relentless:
Mark Gurman
Apple is rumoured to be preparing a three-year plan to shift its hardware strategy radically. The move should be all about refreshing the iPhone lineup with slimmer designs and new form factors, signaling the start of a broader evolution in its product portfolio.
And if you understand the aforementioned Romanesco effect, you can only agree that the timing fits the model. Will radically new hardware and form factors appear in 2026, 2027, or later? This is still an unknown, but you know the market is primed for disruption.
If you want to be playful, or if you're an investor or a company embedded in Apple's value chain one way or another, you might want to also remember that the Reimagination moment is rarely sparked by the incumpbent company responbile of the previous one... Me? I would really keep a close eye on Xiaomi.
But I never try to predict anything.
I prefer to build options.
